It is not believed by the author that such a monstrosity (babies sold from mothers) has ever occurred in South Carolina, as a mistress there usually takes more care of her little Negro property than a black mother ever does of her children.
Poetic justice is in the book: the poor dupe of abolitionists is betrayed into crimes that “destroyed and grieved her conscience,” but the faithful mammy is well rewarded. The Black Gauntlet is an extreme case of special pleading, where vilification of the accursed Negro alternates with praise of his blessedness in slavery. It is noteworthy, however, that Mrs. Schoolcraft’s use of Negro dialect, in this case the Gullah of the low country, is as good as that of any preceding writer.
Suggested by “a popular work of fiction, abusive of southern slavery,” The Yankee Slave Dealer by a Texan (1860) has for its subtitle An Abolitionist Down South. The theme is hackneyed: a northerner attempts in vain to aid slaves to freedom, is won over to the proslavery cause, and winds up by becoming a confirmed slave dealer, inhumane because he was born on the wrong side of the Ohio River. Justus, the Yankee, tries to lure three Negroes to freedom. Moses, the first, is a walking edition of The Bible Defense of Slavery:
Well, heah’s sump’n else, mastuh: we read in the book of Leviticus dat de childin of Isr’l was told dey should buy slaves. I marked de place, and I’ll jes read it to you; doe I s’pose you’s seed it many a time. It’s in de twenty-fif’ chapter, de forty-fif’ and sixt’ verse.
Truly religious, Moses says that he submits because the Bible tells him that such is his duty. Justus approaches the second Negro with ludicrous pomp: “Let an ardent desire to alleviate the woes of the suffering plead my excuse for the breach of decorum.” To this the Negro responds: “What for massah make fun of puoh nigger dis way!” The third specimen, farthest down in the physical and mental scale, runs away with Justus, only to steal his horse and saddle-bags and return to his master. Justus soon learns the proslavery creed that freeing the Negro will merely “people the penitentiary or feed the gibbet.”
Nature, by their inferior capacity and cheerful submission to their lot, has so well fitted them for this position.... The lot of the serving classes in all countries imposes a burden.
Grief is expressed for the white working class of the North; the female slave finds no parallel to the degradation of northern prostitutes. Abounding in such arguments, The Yankee Slave Dealer, though poor in characterization and plot, was the type of novel that the South wanted.
Summary. Less novels than fictional arguments, the first books of the plantation tradition are strikingly similar. Frightened by the success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, southern authors rushed counter-propaganda to the presses. To testify to their culture, they produced crude, ungainly works. They called Mrs. Stowe “a moral scavenger” and worse names; since she was a Yankee woman, the rules of chivalry could be suspended. The pattern seldom varied: scenes of bliss on the plantation alternated with scenes of squalor in the free North. The contented slave, the clown and the wretched freedman are the Negro stereotypes, who put into dialect the creeds of Chancellor Harper and Professor Dew in the Pro-Slavery Argument, and of the Reverend Priest in The Bible Defense of Slavery. A plantation with a kindly master was basis for generalizing about all plantations, of whatever type, in whatever sections. A pampered house-servant, who refuses uncertain freedom for a comparatively easy place, becomes the Negro slave; a poor unemployed wretch becomes the freedman.
The intractable, the ironic, the abused Negro is nowhere on these plantations. Congressmen might deplore in legislative halls the injuries done the South by the Underground Railroad, and southern newspapers might be filled with descriptions of runaways, some second offenders with branded scars on their faces. But runaways in these books are generally flighty creatures and half-wits, and even they finally steal back to the South. Judicial records might be full of instances of brutality, but the occasional whippings are shown to be for due cause such as stealing a ham from a poor woman who could not spare it. Miscegenation is missing in spite of the proofs walking about in the great houses or in the fields or the slave-pens. Slavery is shown as a beneficent guardianship, never as a system of cheap and abundant labor that furnished the basis of a few large fortunes (and assured an impoverished, disfranchised class of poor whites).
In spite of the exaggerations and omissions, however, certain damning evidence creeps in. Though too kind to maltreat Negroes, the cavaliers are adept at tarring-and-feathering, riding on rails, and lynching abolitionist villains, probably out of consideration for the Negro’s welfare. Slavery is sometimes considered as not the Negro’s final state; at some indefinite time (probably after the planters had all become wealthy) he would be returned to Africa to bear witness to the civilization and Christianity he had seen in America. And lastly, the arguers are betrayed by their argumentative tactics: It isn’t true; but since it is, you are worse. Thus: it isn’t true that slavery is a bad system, it is really a fine thing—no worse than the northern and English system of wage-slavery, which is terrible. Proslavery authors were justified in protesting the exploitation of northern factory workers, but to argue that therefore slavery was blessed, is to prove that a man’s broken leg is not painful since another man has a broken arm.